These are the features that make a company's email system appear impressive to outsiders:- |
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| 1 - | Everyone in the company has a consistent email address such as name@mycompany.co.uk |
| 2 - | When people are away from the office they can setup automatic replies to all incoming email and automatic forwarding to colleagues. |
| 3 - | Mailing lists are available which clients can join to receive newsletters from your company. |
Other features that are useful for internal users of the email system:- |
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| 1 - | Email from the various old accounts that users have can be collected and merged with their main company account. |
| 2 - | Various aliases that can accept mail and forward it to the appropriate staff member such as info@mycompany.co.uk or sales@mycompany.co.uk |
| 3 - | Email can be accessed from home and when travelling using a laptop or other mobile device. |
| (I'm going to mention specific suppliers, which are ones I've used and found to work reliably, but I'm sure there are equally good alternatives out there.) | ||
| STEP ONE - Buy an internet domain name
which comes with a catch-all
POP3 mailbox. www.easyspace.com sell ".co.uk" domain names for £4.75 per year with a free POP3 mailbox. After submitting your credit card details the domain should be operational within 24 hours. |
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The shorter the domain name the more impressive the email so ".com" sounds better but costs £8.50 per year and, unless you have an unusual company name, it will be hard to find a suitable .com domain name that's not already been taken. The POP3 mailbox lives on Easyspace's highly-reliable cluster of mail servers somewhere out there on the Internet and collects any email with your chosen domain name in the address, i.e. anything "@mycompany.co.uk". The concept is similar to a Post Office mail sorting centre putting all the mail for one company into one large mailbag.
STEP TWO - Buy and install an email server program to run on one of your internal servers. |
Some people may view a .co.uk domain as more "honest" or "patriotic" for a UK based company. |
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Some people think that Microsoft Exchange is the only option for a mail server. Exchange, with 38% of the mail server market, is designed to handle the email needs of really large companies. It also integrates well with Microsoft Outlook to allow calendar and address book sharing. However it also lacks many features that you'll need and you'll end up buying several 3rd party add-ons to do things like virus scanning, collecting mail from a POP3 mailbox, enforcing a companywide email signature and anti-spam measures. So don't be afraid to consider the alternatives, especially if you don't use Outlook as your mail client. |
If you buy Small Business Server 2003 you'll get Exchange 2003 and Outlook 2003 included for free.
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I recommend MDaemon Mailserver from www.altn.com. It costs £310 for 25 users or £370 for 50 users. You can download and install MDaemon for a fully-functional 30 day trial. If you are happy with it you can then can pay by creditcard to receive you licence key by email or contact the UK agent for MDaemon if you prefer to pay by company cheque. MDaemon is far less resource-hungry and easier to setup and administer than Exchange. |
I have installed MDaemon and Exchange on the same server - that way you get the best of both worlds. |
| STEP THREE - Configure The Email Server. Easy to say, I know, but not that difficult to do if you have the patience to read the manual. The hardest part is knowing what steps to take. Here's a list:- | ||||
| 1 - | Set Up An Account For Every User.
This is where you create all the email addresses. You'll have to decide
your naming convention:- firstname@mycompany.co.uk, surname@mycompany.co.uk, firstname+first initial of surname@mycompany.co.uk, surname.firstname@mycompany.co.uk etc. Internet best practices say you should create the alias of postmaster@mycompany.co.uk and abuse@mycompany.co.uk for a suitable staff member and send all undeliverable mail to them to deal with. Undeliverable mail is where mail is received with letters to the left of the @ sign that don't correspond to a valid user - often because of a spelling mistake. |
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| 2 - | Set up Domain POP. This is what MDaemon calls going to Easyspace to collect the "mailbag" and distributing the contents to the local users' mailboxes. You'll also have to set a schedule for how often to collect the mail. This depends on your Internet connection costs but I recommend a minimum of every 30 minutes during office hours and every 2 hours outside of this time. | The version of Exchange that comes with SBS2003 actually contains a POP3 connector for collecting mail from a catch-all mailbox. I have found it unreliable and won't use it. |
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| 3 - | Collect Mail From Users' Existing Email Accounts. For users who only use email at work but have been using an external account, set up MultiPOP so that MDaemon regularly collects the email from these external mailboxes and deposits it into the new internal mailboxes. MDaemon can read multiple external mailboxes including, with a bit of tweaking, web-based email services like HotMail and Yahoo Mail. Keep this going this for at least 6 months. | |||
| 4 - | Forward "mycompany.co.uk" Email for Users who Access their Email from Outside the Office. For users who need to access their email from outside the office, the simplest way is to forward their company email to an email account they already have with an ISP. This account is then accessed both when at the office and from outside. | |||
| 5 - | Configure Outgoing Mail Delivery. As you're now running your own email system, your server should deliver email directly to the recipient's email server. This way you can see any emails that are stuck in the outgoing queue and quickly sort out problems such as a mis-spelt address. Sending email has a few extra problems linked to the rise in spam and viruses in the last few years:- | |||
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You must operate from behind a fixed IP address as mailservers at large ISPs have a list of all IP ranges used for dynamically allocated IP addresses and will refuse to accept your mail. | |||
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You must use the DNS name of your static IP address in the EHLO command - sometimes called the masquerade name. Again, if this doesn't match the result of a DNS lookup the receiving server may refuse your mail. | |||
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Set MDaemon to attempt to deliver all mail directly but if this fails then send it to a Smarthost. A Smarthost is an SMTP server at your ISP - if you have a dial-up circuit then you'll have no alternative but to use this. Some Smarthosts aren't so smart and won't accept mail if the sender's address doesn't match the email address the ISP gave to you and which you probably aren't using. You should check this out with your ISP. | If you are unsure about the Smarthost you can register your domain with a company that provides a Smarthost as part of their service such as Xcalibur and Easily |
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| 6 - | Enable Web Configuration. This means that each user can contact the MDaemon server via a web browser to control the out-of-office auto-responder and mail-forwarding settings for their account. | |||
| 7 - | Edit the Content Filter to Remove Emails with Suspicious Attachments that could Contain Viruses. These can be identified by the filename extension of the attached file and the following is my recommended list of filename extensions to be outlawed:- | |
| ade adp bas bat chm cmd com cpl crt exe hlp hta inf ins isp js jse lnk mdb mde msc msi msp mst pcd pif reg scr sct shs shb url vb vbs vbe wsf wsh wsc | ||
| I'd set it up so that offending
attachments are automatically deleted a notification, if any, is only sent
to the postmaster. Note that this is not comprehensive virus protection for your email system but it's an easy step to take which goes a long way towards protecting your company against viruses |
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| 8 - | Configure Client PCs. You'll need to make the following changes in your users' email programs:- | |
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Change the SMTP server setting in everyone's email program to the internal IP address or hostname of the server running MDaemon. | |
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Change everyone's email address setting to the new mycompany.co.uk address. | |
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For all the users who aren't having their mycompany.co.uk email forwarded externally, change the POP3 server setting to the internal IP address or hostname of the server running MDaemon. | |
Other Features
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You can purchase an anti-virus add-in from Kapersky Labs for the MDaemon server which extends the attachment-blocking measure described in STEP 3 POINT 7 above to make your email system watertight. You will also need to buy an annual subscription to continue to receive virus definition updates. |
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A recent add-on for MDaemon called Groupware allows users of Outlook to share Contacts, Calendar and ToDo list folders just like Exchange. |
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If you have a permanent connection
to the Internet you can enable remote access to your MDaemon server via WebMail,
SMTP and POP3 for access from home, any PC with web access, laptops, PDAs
and other mobile devices. You can use a digital certificate to encrypt all such communications. |
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The Pro version of MDaemon has spam blocking and filtering built-in. If you currently receive large amounts of spam you'll love this feature. For safety you should nominate someone to check the spam folder for any genuine emails that have ended up there. |
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You can setup Public Folders to allow newsletters and other general interest emails to be accessed by all staff without having to distribute a copy to everyone. Emails over 30 days old can be automatically deleted. |
| If email is important to your company's operation then running your own mail server is a way of maximising email's effectiveness, ensuring its smooth running and responding quickly to any problems. |
